Ben Cotten | Pastor, Writer, Father, Husband

This is funny. Like, watch it 8 times and laugh a little too loudly in Starbucks funny. I watched this several times myself. Then I started to wonder how William Shatner could ever think this was normal, cool, or interesting when he filmed it. Certainly, the editing makes it more funny but it’s obvious that the original would have been bazaar on its own. He’s such an over-actor that ANYTHING he says sounds a little loopy.

The only way that William Shatner could over-act so heavily is if in his own mind he thinks he is actually spot on. In other words, his perception of what he is doing is completely different from everyone else’s. He must have been thinking, “I’m really in my acting prime now. All that Star Trek stuff was just a stepping stone to this ‘Climbing the Mountain” work.” Well… maybe he wasn’t thinking that exactly, but you get the idea.

You don’t have any baggage. What you have is a testimony. When Jesus looks at your past, he doesn’t see a pile of heavy baggage. What He sees are signs of a life lived as a recipient of His eternal mercy and love. The moment He comes into our hearts, He transforms our baggage into testimonies. He then points to our past and says, “This is what my love can do. This is Who I am. I transform orphans into sons and daughters.”

Church, we are more than we have been told. We are more than brick and mortar, more than saccharine lyrics to re-run melodies. We are more than religious self-help, whose greatest hope is to survive. We are more than dreamers in pursuit of dreams that are bound to our small imaginations. We are more than an institution that has lost its relevancy and is struggling to rebuild its tower of Babel.

We are the Bride of Christ. Loved beyond measure, with no borders to His patience, forgiveness, and grace. We are never beyond repair. Never out of the reach of His transformation.

I believe the Church in America is being romanced by Jesus. We are being redefined as His Bride, and only His Bride. We are being ravished by Him – called by name.

This spoken word poem/skit reminds me of who I am as a friend of God. I hope it does the same for you.

A thousand time YES to this! I don’t think I could have said it better myself.

This is what my heart as a pastor beats for. Pointing people into their destiny to shape and transform the culture that exists beyond the sacred walls of the church. We do not exist to feed the church building, the programs that fill it, or the budget that pays for it. We exist to be loved by God and to be unrestricted conduits of that love to a world that is dying to be rescued.

What would church life be like in this world that Alan Scott proposes? I think it would look and feel a lot more like the book Acts than what we typically experience right now.

One of my favorite, and most daunting, responsibilities as a pastor is weekly preaching. I take it pretty seriously as a part of my life’s calling. And most of the time it goes really well. It’s one of the few things that I do that I feel like I’m somewhat good at.

But that’s not to say it ALWAYS goes well. Sometimes I have to take DayQuil because a cold has hit me before it’s too late to call in reinforcements. That’s what happened this past week.

When I started the morning on Sunday I had no idea that the day would eventually end with me inspecting the inside of my toilet at home with the kind of scrutiny that only health inspectors and ecoli should endure.

I got out of bed with a dull headache from the cold I had come down with, but was generally feeling better.

Knowing that I would have to be focused for my message in a few hours, I dropped a couple shots of DayQuil. I should have remembered what this unholy elixir does to my tender brain cells, but still I threw caution to the wind and dropped those shots like a Pepto on Bingo night. Had I read the label, I’m now sure it would have read “DayQuil: Meth Formula — for those mornings when that snuffy head, fever, cough, runny nose, achy, sneezy, sinus disease you have can only be dealt with by an over-the-counter methamphetamine”.

I never lost consciousness, but I do vaguely recall the following events in a kind of dreamy, subconsious, chuck-norris-whispering-in-The-Octagon kind of way:

Kirk is Climbing a Mountain, American Idol and Other Misperceptions

The Bride of Christ: Ready or Not

DayQuil Sermons

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